A 12-part investigative series on AT&T, the Bell System, and Black America — from Reconstruction through the 1973 EEOC consent decree and after. Every part, in order.
The federal government filed its lawsuit against AT&T and its consent decree resolving that lawsuit on the same day — January 18, 1973 — because the settlement had already been negotiated before the case was ever formally filed. Part 6 of a 12-part series, covering 1970 to 1973.
For nearly a century, the exclusion this series has documented was legal — a company or a union could refuse to hire someone because of race and face no federal employment-discrimination law at all. Part 5 of a 12-part series, covering 1964 to 1970.
A Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company official told a Washington, D.C. radio audience, on the record, that the company would not hire Black operators until the city’s schools were integrated — and it would take, in his own estimate, two or three more generations. Part 4 of a 12-part series, covering 1952 to 1974.
It took a Black labor leader threatening to put 100,000 marchers in the streets of the nation’s capital — and a war that made every available worker matter — to force the first real opening in the telephone industry’s hiring pattern. Part 3 of a 12-part series, covering 1941 to 1953.
By the time the Bell System had grown into the largest private employer in the country, the union that represented most of its skilled workers barred Black membership outright — and the company’s own hiring pattern needed no written rule to produce the same result. Part 2 of a 12-part series, covering 1900 to 1945.
AT&T did not exist during slavery — the company began in 1877 — but it was born into Reconstruction’s collapse and built its first workforce inside a country actively re-legalizing racial exclusion. Part 1 of a 12-part series, with primary documents from the Library of Congress and AT&T’s own archive.